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Last Wednesday we held the third MIDiA Quarterly forum, exploring the shift from ownership to access across different media industries. In addition to MIDiA analyst presentations we had panellists from Sky, The Economist, Beggars Group, Reed Smith and Readly. The event was held at The Ministry in London and was a great success. Be sure to make it to our next one! Here are some of the key themes we explored.

Change is a coming

We opened with three quotes that summarise the tensions and transformations taking place in the digital content marketplace:

‘The fine wines of France are not merely content for the glass making industry’, Andrew Lloyd-Webber

‘Content may still be king but distribution is the queen and she wears the trousers’, Jonah Peretti, BuzzFeed

All three quotes represent very different worldviews and illustrate how different things can look from the perspective of the companies being disrupted, those doing the disruption and those building businesses to harness the disruption. All three viewpoints are simultaneously valid, but the media landscape is changing at rapid pace, and fighting a rear-guard action against change only gives the disruptors a freer rein to, well, disrupt.

Across most media industries – music, video and news especially, the future of content monetisation will be built around advertising for the mass market and subscriptions for the aficionados, while additional opportunities exist for one-off transactions within both environments (e.g. Tencent live streaming Chinese boyband TFBoysand Epic Games selling $100 million a month of virtual items in Fortnite). What is going as a mainstream proposition is selling physical media, though niche markets for collectables will thrive—ironically exactly because of the demise of physical media. In an age without shelves full of CDs, DVDs and games, collectors want a physical manifestation of their tastes.

Music and video are plotting the most directly comparable paths towards access-based models, though there are also some very telling differences:

Scale:Globally there were 206 million music subscribers at the end of 2017, compared to 452 million video subscribers. But while subscriptions represented 45% of retail music revenues, it was just 12% of pay-TV revenues. Music though is a far smaller industry than pay-TV (11% of the size), so like-for-like comparisons aren’t always that useful.

Concentration:What is worth comparing though, is the degree of market concentration. In music, the top four subscription services account for 72% of subscribers, compared to just 54% for video. And while the long tail for music services isn’t very, well, long, in video there is a vast number of smaller services: there are around 60 different services in the US alone.

Variety:While music services largely offer the same catalogue, with the same usage terms at the same price, video is defined by diversity and exclusives. Using the US as an example again, more than half of the services are niche – such as Korean drama, 4K nature, horror, reality – and there are 23, yes 23, different price points.

Aside the different heritages of these industries – consumers are used to paying for different slices of TV content, there is another key reason for the differences: rights holder distribution. In music three big companies account for the majority of revenues; in TV there are dozens of key studios and networks. This means that in video, the distribution companies can play rights holders off each other and effectively set the pace of change. In music, the major record labels shape the market.

This dynamic is what Clayton Christensen outlined in the Innovator’s Dilemma. There are two key types of innovation:

Sustaining innovations:the smaller, more evolutionary changes that companies make to improve their existing products. Every company does this if they can, it’s how to maintain the status quo and grow revenues predictably

Disruptive innovations:these are dramatic, industry-altering changes that rarely come from the incumbents but instead from disruptive new entrants. P2P file sharing was the big one that shook the TV and music industries. TV responded by fighting free with free, by launching services like iPlayer, ABC.com and Hulu. The music industry responded by licensing to the iTunes Music store. One embraced disruption, one fought it.

Talking of disruption, the big existential threat media companies will have to face over the coming decade, is ceding power, willingly or otherwise, to the tech majors (Alphabet, Amazon, Apple and Facebook). Europe’s Article 13aims to offset some of the growing reach of the tech majors, but ultimately these companies will shape the future of media, across both ad supported and subscription models.

The tech majors generated $40.7 billion in ad revenue in Q1 2018 alone, including around $2 billion for Amazon, the global advertising revenue powerhouse that many still aren’t paying enough attention to. The tech majors have already sucked away much of the news industry’s audience and ad revenues; with assets such as YouTube and IGTVthey are competing for radio and TV too. But it is the content and services revenue that media companies need to pay most attention to. With $16.9 billion in Q1 alone – nearly the same as the recorded music market for the entirety of 2017, this is a sector that all four tech majors are taking seriously, very seriously. And even though Facebook is a late arrival to the party, it is making up for lost time with its new music offeringand evolving video strategy.

The reason all this matters for media companies is that the strategic objectives of the tech major are rarely aligned with those of media companies. The tech majors each use media as a means to an end, a tool for driving their core strategy. Access based models underpin the content strategies of these companies who often control distribution and access to consumers via tools such as app stores, mobile operating systems, search and social platforms. Thus, the shift from ownership to access could also translate into a shift towards a tech major dominated media world.

Earlier this week the IFPI released its Global Music Report – an essential tool for anyone with a serious interest in the global recorded music business. One interesting trend to emerge was the slowdown in Swedish streaming growth and its knock-on effect on overall recorded music revenues. Sweden has long been the leading indicator for where streaming is likely to head, providing a picture of just how vibrant a sophisticated streaming market can be. But now, with the market reaching saturation, it also gives us some clues as to what the long-term revenue outlook for the global music market could be.

According to the IFPI, Swedish streaming revenues reached $141.3 million in 2017, up from $125.7 million in 2016, with subscriptions accounting for 96% of the total. That was an increase of just $9.3 million, or 7% year-on-year growth, down from 10% in 2016 and 23% in 2015. This is a typical trajectory for a market when it has progressed to the top end of the growth curve. With synchronisationand performance revenues collectively growing by just $1.5 million in 2017 and downloads and physical both continuing their long-term decline, streaming is not only the beating heart of Swedish music revenues, it is the only driver of growth. Consequently, overall Swedish recorded music revenues grew by just 4% in 2017, compared to 6% in 2016 and 10% in 2015. As streaming matures, total market growth slows.

So what can we extrapolate from Sweden onto the global market? Firstly, there are a number of unique market characteristics to be considered:

Sweden is the home of Spotify, so adoption over indexes

Incumbent telco Telia provided a lot of early stage growth for Spotify

iTunes never really got going in Sweden, so the legacy download market was a much smaller part of the market than it is globally

Physical music sales are further along in their decline (now just 10% of all revenues)

These factors considered imply that Sweden is an indicator of an optimum state streaming market; others may not get there or will not get there so quickly. This could mean that legacy formats decline more quickly in comparison, making total revenue growth slower. However, given that downloads are a bigger chunk of revenues in most markets, these factors should cancel each other out. Therefore, an annual growth of 4% in total music revenues is a decent benchmark for long-term revenue growth.

The question is, what happens to the remnants of declining legacy format revenue? Do those CD and download buyers disappear out of the market, or does some of their revenue switch over to ensure that growth continues further? The likelihood is that Apple will see much of its longer-term growth come from converting higher value iTunes customers into subscribers, but there is a clear case for expanding the market beyond 9.99. The current 10% price hike experiment Spotify is running in Norway is one route. But, a suite of higher tier products is a better solution, as are super-cheap low-end products (e.g. $0.25 a week for Today’s Top Hits) and, of course, boosting ad-supported revenue to steal audience from radio. That latter point is probably the best long-term option for pushing real continual recorded music industry growth.

One of the core values that we deliver to our clients at MIDiA Research is finding the ‘third number’— the data point that wasn’t reported by a company but that can be arrived at through a process of modelling and triangulation. Next week, we will publish a report that does just this for the numbers presented in Spotify’s F1 filing. The metrics we arrive at help create a more complete picture of Spotify’s performance for investors and rights holders, as well as the impact of core metrics upon other parts of Spotify’s business. In advance of its publication, here are just a few highlights.

Spotify’s F1 filing paints a picture of a growing business that is improving metrics across the board, with the foundations for a solid couple of years ahead now well built. But there are also a number of challenges:

User growth: Spotify experienced strong growth between Q4 2015 and Q4 2017, increasing its subscriber base from 28 million to 71 million, its ad supported users from 64 million to 92 million and its total monthly active users (MAUs) from 91 million to 159 million. Set in the longer-term context, Spotify’s subscriber growth trajectory indicates it is well up the growth curve, with 2014 representing the earlier growth phase and Q1 2015 the point at which the inflection point occurred. Since Apple Music entered the market in mid 2015, Spotify has seen growth actually increase, and over the period added more net new subscribers by the end of 2017 (49 million) than Apple Music did (34 million).

Streams up, but inactive subscribers also: Engagement is growing, with subscribers playing an average of 630 streams a month in 2017 compared to 438 in 2015. Over the same period ad supported users increased average monthly streams from 119 to 222. The net result was 195.4 billion streams in 2017 compared to 59.6 billion in 2015. However, inactive subscribers (i.e. subscribers plus ad supported users minus MAU) grew from one million in Q1 2016 to four million in Q4 2017. Though this is a long way off the ‘zombie users’ problem that Deezer has historically suffered from due to inactive telco bundles, it is a metric Spotify will need to keep on top of.

Churn down…: Throughout 2016 and 2017 Spotify progressively reduced its churn rate from 6.9% for Q1 2016 to 5.7% in Q4 2017. This is despite churn being pushed up by the super trials and thus reflects a solid improvement of organic retention across Spotify’s paid user base. In a March investor presentation, CFO Barry McCarthy argued that as Spotify’s subscriber base matures, life time value (LTV) and gross profit will increase, with more subscribers sticking around for longer.

…but not out: Despite quarterly falls, churn remains a core issue while Spotify is in growth phase and is acquiring portions of subscribers who try out the service but realise it is not for them. On an annual basis churn 18% in 2017, down from 18.5% in 2016. These lost subscribers totalled 12.8 million in 2017, up from 8.9 million one year earlier. Spotify added 23 million subscribers to its year-end total in 2017 but, including churned out subscriber the total subscribers gained was 35.8 million. Thus, churned subscribers accounted for 36% of all subscribers gained. This process of getting more subscribers in than out is common to all premium subscription businesses and is particularly pronounced when a service is in growth phase, as is the case with Spotify. It is even more pronounced in contract-free subscriptions. Pay-TV and mobile companies have the benefit of long-term contracts to minimise churn. The fact that Spotify reports churn at all is creditable. McCarthy’s old company Netflix got so fed up with investors’ reactions to churn that it stopped reporting it all together.

Super trials: Spotify’s subscriber growth has not however been linear. Heavily discounted trials offering three-month subscriptions for $1 have been pivotal in driving strong user growth spikes each quarter in which they run. On average, Spotify’s global subscriber base grew by a net total of 2.8 million each quarter between Q4 2015 and Q4 2017 in the quarters that these ‘super trials’ were not running, but by 7.5 million in the quarters that they did.

Non-linear growth affects all regions: In 2016 and 2017, Spotify’s European and North American subscriber bases each grew at an average of one million subscribers in quarters without trials and three million and two million respectively in quarters with them. Thus, Spotify’s organic net monthly subscriber growth in each of these regions was around 330,000. A similar trend appeared in Latin America – where net subscriber growth doubled in each trial quarter from one to two million. The impact is more dramatic in rest of world, where rounded net subscriber growth was flat in all quarters without trials and more than one million in quarters with.

Despite the joint effects of subscriber bill shock and reduced margins, super trials are clearly net positive for Spotify’s business. When it later decides to fade them out in more mature markets – namely when it switches from user acquisition to user retention mode – Spotify will be able to quickly improve both margin and retention.

Barring calamity, Spotify looks set to have a strong 2018 in terms of growth across subscriptions, MAUs and revenue. If it continues its current operating strategy Spotify should reach 93 million subscribers by the end of 2018. By comparison, Apple Music is likely to have hit around 56 million subscribers by Q4 2018, with its rate of net new monthly subscribers having increased to 2 million in 2018.

If you are not yet a MIDiA subscription client and would like to find out how to get a copy of the forthcoming seven-slide report and accompanying dataset, email stephen@midiaresearch.com

Spotify just filed its F1 for its DPO. The most anticipated business event in the recorded music industry since, well…as long as most can remember, is one big step closer. The filing is a treasure trove of data and metrics, and while there won’t be too many surprises to anyone who follows the company closely, there are none the less a lot of very interesting findings and themes. The full filing can be found here. Here are some of the key points of interest:

Most of the numbers are heading in the right direction: MAUs, subscribers, hours spent etc are all going up while churn and cost ratios are heading down. Premium ARPU was an exception, declining: 2015 – €7.06 / 2016 – €6.00 / 2017 €5.24, which reflects pricing promotions. But Spotify was never going to have fixed every aspect of its business in time for its listing, that was never the point. What Spotify needs to convince potential shareholders is that it is heading in the right direction. The narrative that emerges here is of a company that has helped create an entire marketplace, that has made great ground so far and that is poised for even bigger and better things. That narrative and the clear momentum should be enough to see Spotify through. As I’ve previously noted, investor demand currently exceeds supply. If you are a big institutional investor wanting to get into music, there are few options. Pandora aside, this is pretty much the only big music tech stock in town. As long as Spotify can keep these metrics heading in the right direction, it should have a much smoother first few quarters than Snap Inc did, even though a profit is unlikely to materialise in that time.

Spotify is baring its metrics soul: Spotify has put a lot of metrics on the line, setting the bar for future SEC filings. While competitor streaming services will be busy plugging the numbers into Excel so they can compare with their own, the rest of the marketplace now has a much clearer sense of what running a streaming service entails. One really encouraging development is Spotify’s introduction of Daily Active User (DAU) metrics. As we have long argued at MIDiA, monthly numbers are an anachronism in the digital era, a measure of reach not engagement. So, Spotify is to be applauded for being the first major streaming service to start showing true engagement metrics.

Users and engagement are lifting: Spotify had 159 million MAUs in 2017, with 71 million paid and 92 million ad supported. Europe was the biggest region (58 million total MAUs) followed by North America (52 million), Latin America (33 million) and Rest of Word (17 million). The latter two are the fastest growing regions. Meanwhile, 44% of MAUs are DAUs, up from 37% in Q1 2015, which shows that users are becoming more engaged, though the shape of the curve (see chart below) shows that when swathes of new users are on-boarded, engagement can be dented. Consumption is also growing (a sign of both user growth and increased engagement): quarterly content hours went from 17.4 billion in 2015 to 40.3 billion in 2017. There are some oddities too. For example, ad supported MAUs actually declined in Q2 2017 by 1 million on Q1 2017 and in Q4 2017 only increased by 1 million on the previous quarter to reach 92 million.

The future of radio: Spotify puts a big focus on spoken word content and podcasts in the filing, as it does on advertiser products. It also lists radio companies first and subscription companies second as its key competitors. Meanwhile ad supported flicked into generating a gross profit in 2017 (ad supported went from -12% gross margin in 2016 to 10% in 2017. Premium gross margin up from 16% to 22% over same period.) As MIDiA predicted last year, free is going to be a big focus of Spotify in 2018 and beyond. The first chapter of Spotify’s story was about becoming the future of retail. The next will be about becoming the future of radio. And the increased focus on spoken word is not only about stealing radio’s clothes, it is about creating higher margin content than music. None of this is to say that Spotify will necessarily execute well, but this is the strategy nonetheless.

Spotify is still losing money but is trending in the right direction: Spotify’s cost of revenue in 2017 was €3,241 million against revenue of €4,090 with an operating loss of €378 million. However, losses are not growing much (€336 in 2016) and financing its debt added a whopping €974 million in 2017, from €336 million in 2016. Part of the purpose of the DPO is to ensure debt holders, investors and of course founders and employees get to see a return of their respective investments in money and blood, sweat and tears. Once that is done, financing costs will normalize. Also, Spotify’s new label licensing deals are kicking in, with costs of revenue as a share of premium revenue falling from 84% in 2016 to 78% in 2017. Spotify is not yet profitable but it is getting its house in order.

All in all, there is enough in this filing to both convince potential investors to make the bet while also providing enough fodder for critics to throw doubt on the commercial sustainability of streaming. Spotify’s structural challenge is that none of the other big streaming services have to worry about turning a profit. In fact, it is in their collective interest to keep market costs high to make it harder for their number one competitor to prosper.

But in the realms of what Spotify can impact itself, the overriding trend in this filing is that Spotify is well and truly on the right track. For now, and the next 9 months or so, Spotify will likely remain the darling of the sector. But after that, investors will start wanting a lot more if they are going to keep holding the stock. Spotify is promising that the best days are yet to come. Now it needs to deliver.

As the streaming music market matures, the bar is continually raised for the quality of data required, both in terms of granularity and accuracy. At MIDiA we have worked hard to earn a reputation for high-quality, reliable datasets that go far beyond what is available elsewhere. This gives our clients a competitive edge. We are now taking this approach a major step forward with the launch of MIDiA’s Streaming Services Market Shares report. This is our most comprehensive streaming dataset yet, and there is, quite simply, nothing else like it out there. Knowing the size of streaming revenues, or the global subscriber counts of music services is useful, but it isn’t enough. Nor even, is knowing country level streaming revenue figures. So, we built a global market shares model that breaks out subscription revenues (trade and retail), subscribers, and subscription market shares for more than 30 music services at country level, across 30 countries and regions. You want to know how much subscription revenue Spotify is generating in Canada? How many subscribers Apple Music has in Germany? How much subscription revenue QQ Music is generating China? This is the report for you. Here are some highlights:

At the end of 2016 there were 132.6 million music subscribers, up from 76.8 million in 2015

In Q4 2016 Spotify’s subscriber market share was 35% and it had $2,766 million in retail revenue

Apple Music was second with 21 million subscribers at the end of 2016, a 15.6% market share and it had $912 million in retail revenue

In 2016 Apple was the largest driver of digital music revenue across Apple Music and iTunes

The US is the largest music subscription market, which Spotify leads with 38% subscriber market share

The UK is Europe’s largest streaming market, which Spotify also leads

China’s subscriber base is the second largest globally, but it ranks just 13th in revenue terms

Japan is the world’s third largest subscription market, in which Amazon has the largest subscriber market share

Brazil is Latin America’s largest music subscription market

The report contains 23 pages and 13 charts with full country detail as well as audience engagement metrics. The dataset includes four worksheets and a comprehensive methodology statement.

Streaming Services Market Shares is available right now to MIDiA premium subscribers. If you would like to learn more about how to access MIDiA’s analysis and data, email Stephen@midiaresearch.com.

OK, you’re going to have to bear with me on this one, but let me take you back to 2nd century Rome….

Roman Slaves

The Roman Empire was at the peak of its powers. Its borders stretched from Scotland down to Syria and across to Armenia, and across its dominions Rome spread its culture, language, administration and of course, military prowess. It brought innovations such as under floor heating, running water, astronomy and brain surgery but the consensus among many modern day historians is that the Roman Empire could have been much more. Rome was fundamentally a military, expansionist state. Its endless conquests produced a steady flow of captured people that fuelled Rome’s most important economic interest: the slave trade. By the mid 2nd century around 1 in 4 Romans were slaves. It was common for wealthy citizens to have 40 or more household slaves while the super-rich had hundreds.

The Importance Of Economic Surplus

The problem was that the over-supply of labour meant that wages were horrifically low for the masses while the rich over spent on slaves to keep up with the neighbours. The net result is that the Roman Empire was not able to create an economic surplus across its population, which meant that there was insufficient investment in learning, science and culture. If that surplus had been created, Rome would have spawned a generation of innovators, inventors and entrepreneurs that should have created an industrial revolution. This raises the tantalizing possibility of steam power and steel emerging before the middle ages, which in turn could have meant that today’s technology revolution might have happened hundreds of years ago by now.

Instead, the Roman Empire eventually crumbled with Europe forgetting most of Rome’s innovations, paved roads weeding over, aqueducts running dry and heated floors crumbling. We had to wait until the second half of the 18th century for the Industrial Revolution for the change, which crucially followed and overlapped with the Age of Enlightenment, a period of learning unprecedented since the Renaissance (when everyone busied themselves relearning Rome’s lost secrets) which was fuelled by Europe’s economies have developed sufficiently to create enough surplus for more than just the aristocracy to learn, invent and create.

So, Rome inadvertently held back human progress by half a millennium because of its obsession with slaves. But what does that mean for Spotify? The key lesson from the Roman experience is that being saddled with too large a cost base may not prevent you from becoming big but it will hold you back from fulfilling your potential and from building something truly lasting. You can probably tell now where I am heading with this. Spotify’s 70% rights cost base is Rome’s 1 in 4 are slaves.

Product Innovation Where Are You?

Spotify has made immense progress but it and the overall market have done too little to innovate product and user experience. There’s been business and commercial innovation for sure but looking back at the streaming market as a whole over the last 5 years, other than making playlists better through smart use of data and curation teams, where is the dial-moving innovation? Where are the new products and features that can change the entire focus of the market. Compare and contrast how much the likes of Google, Facebook and Amazon have changed their businesses and product offerings over that period. Streaming just got better playlists. Musical.ly shouldn’t have been a standalone company, it should have been a feature coming out of Spotify’s Stockholm engineering team. But instead of being able to think about streaming simply as an engine, Spotify has had to marshal its modest operating margins around ‘sustaining’ product development and marketing / customer acquisition.

Post-Listing Scrutiny

Spotify will likely go public sometime next year as a consequence. But once public it will need to be delivering demonstrable progress towards profit with each and every quarterly SEC filing. Growth alone won’t cut it. Just ask Snap Inc. Spotify does not have a silver bullet but it does have a number of different switches it can flick that will each contribute percentages to net margin and that collectively can help Spotify become commercially viable and in turn enable it to invest in the product and experience innovation that the streaming sector so crucially lacks. Spotify hasn’t done these yet because most will antagonize rights partners but it will be left with little option.

Spotify The Music Company

To say that Spotify will become a label is too narrow a definition of what Spotify would become. Instead it would be a next generation music company, encompassing master rights, publishing, A+R, discovery, promotion, fan engagement and data, lots of data. If Spotify can get a couple of good quarters under its belt post-listing, and maintain a high stock price then it could go on an acquisition spree, acquiring assets for a combination of cash and stock. And the bigger and bolder the acquisition the more the stock price will rise, giving Spotify yet more ability to acquire. This is the model Yahoo used in the 2000s, with apparently over-priced acquisitions being so big as to impress Wall Street enough to ensure that the increase in market cap (ie the value of its shares) was greater than the purchase price. Spotify could use this tactic to acquire, for example, Kobalt, Believe Digital and Soundcloud to create an end-to-end, data-driven discovery, consumption and rights exploitation music power house.

What other ‘label’ could offer artists the end-to-end ability to be discovered, have your audience brought to you, promoted on the best playlists, given control of your rights and be provided with the most comprehensive data toolkit available in music? And of course, by acquiring a portion of the rights of its creators though not all (that’s where Kobalt / AWAL comes in) Spotify will be able to amortize some of its content costs like Netflix does, thus adding crucial percentages to its net margin. It will also be able to do Netflix’s other trick, namely using its algorithms to over index its own content, again adding crucial percentages to its margin.

Streaming Is The Engine Not The Vehicle

The way to think about Spotify right now, and indeed streaming as a whole, is that we have built a great engine. But that’s it. We do not have the car. Streaming is not a product, it is a technology for getting music onto our devices and it is a proto-business model. While rights holders can point to areas where Spotify is arguably over spending, fixing those will not be enough on their own, they need to accompany bolder change. Once that change comes Spotify can start to fulfil its potential, to become the butterfly that is currently locked in its cocoon. While rights holders we be understandably anxious and may even cry foul, they have to shoulder much of the blame. Spotify simply doesn’t have anywhere else to go. Unless of course it wants to end up like Rome did….overrun by barbarians, or whatever the music industry equivalent is…

Streaming has driven such a revenue renaissance within the major record labels that the financial markets are now falling over themselves to work out where they can invest in the market, and indeed whether they should. For large financial institutions, there are not many companies that are big enough to be worth investing in. Vivendi is pretty much it. Some have positions in Sony, but as the music division is a smaller part of Sony’s overall business than it is for Vivendi, a position in Sony is only an indirect position in the music business.

The other bet of course is Spotify. With demand exceeding supply these look like good times to be on the sell side of music stocks, though it is worth noting that some hedge funds are also exploring betting against both Vivendi and Spotify. Nonetheless, the likely outcome is that there will be a flurry of activity around big music company stocks, with streaming as the fuel in the engine. With this in mind it is worth contextualizing where streaming is right now and where it fits within the longer term evolution of the market.

The evolution of paid streaming can be segmented into three key phases:

Market Entry: This is when streaming was getting going and desktop is still a big part of the streaming experience. Only a small minority of users paid and those that did were tech savvy, music aficionados. As such they skewed young-ish male and very much towards music super fans. These were people who liked to dive deep into music discovery, investing time and effort to search out cool new music, and whose tastes typically skewed towards indie artists. It meant that both indie artists and back catalogue over indexed in the early days of streaming. Because so many of these early adopters had previously been high spending music buyers, streaming revenue growth being smaller than the decline of legacy formats emerged as the dominant trend. $40 a month consumers were becoming $9.99 a month consumers.

Surge: This is the ongoing and present phase. This is the inflection point on the s-curve, where more numerous early followers adopt. The rapid revenue and subscriber growth will continue for the remainder of 2017 and much of 2018. The demographics are shifting, with gender distribution roughly even, but there is a very strong focus on 25-35 year olds who value paid streaming for the ability to listen to music on their phone whenever and wherever they are. Curation and playlists have become more important in order to help serve the needs of these more mainstream users—still strong music fans— but not quite the train spotter obsessives that drive phase one. A growing number of these users are increasing their monthly spend up to $9.99, helping ensure streaming drives market level growth.

Maturation: As with all technology trends, the phases overlap. We are already part way into phase three: the maturing of the market. With saturation among the 25-35 year-old music super fans on the horizon in many western markets, the next wave of adoption will be driven by widening out the base either side of the 25-35 year-old heartland. This means converting the fast growing adoption among Gen Z with new products such as unbundled playlists. At the other end of the age equation, it means converting older consumers— audiences for whom listening to music on the go on smartphones is only part (or even none) of their music listening behaviour. Car technologies such as interactive dashboards and home technologies such as Amazon’s echo will be key to unlocking these consumers. Lean back experiences will become even more important than they are now with voice and AI (personalizing with context of time, place and personal habits) becoming key.

It has been a great 18 months for streaming and strong growth lies ahead in the near term that will require little more effort than ‘more of the same’. But beyond that, for western markets, new, more nuanced approaches will be required. In some markets such as Sweden, where more than 90% of the paid opportunity has already been tapped, we need this phase three approach right now. Alongside all this, many emerging markets are only just edging towards phase 2. What is crucial for rights holders and streaming services alike is not to slacken on the necessary western market innovation if growth from emerging markets starts delivering major scale. Simplicity of product offering got us to where we are but a more sophisticated approach is needed for the next era of paid streaming.

NOTE: I’m going on summer vacation so this will be the last post from me for a couple of weeks.

This is a guest post from MIDiA’s Media and Music Analyst Zach Fuller.

For a brief moment last year, windowing seemed like the future of music streaming. Already common practice in the film-industry, the strategy was being touted as a way of utilising artist fan engagement to drive registrations (both freemium and paid) to streaming services, thus engendering the payment behaviours that would ultimately grow the industry. Yet, as MIDiA addressed last year, Frank Ocean’s bait-and-switch manoeuvre with Universal in August 2016 sent shockwaves through an industry still acclimatising to streaming economics. Arriving on the coat-tails of a windowing gold-rush that had seen releases by Beyonce, Kanye West and Chance the Rapper all utilising the strategy, Ocean’s move effectively put the brakes on the practice, leaving Universal CEO Lucian Grainge allegedly so infuriated that he ordered a company-wide halt to any further windowing projects.

Fast forward to 2017 and Jay-Z’s 4:44 has brought windowing back to the fore. Whilst numerous personal revelations (as well as receiving Jay-Z’s best critical response since 2003’s The Black Album)have meant blanket press coverage across social and traditional media, it is also notable that 4:44 is the first major windowing project to arrive this year. This is despite 2017 presenting two substantial windowing opportunities with Ed Sheeran’s new album and Harry Styles’ self-titled debut – however neither were windowed on any service. Jay-Z however, is in a very different position to most artists. Aside from owning his own streaming service, Jay-Z’s control over his artistic output extends back to the very beginning of his career. He co-founded his own label, Roc-A-Fella Records (distributed through Universal), to release his debut back in 1996, and as was reported last year, he is now in full control of his own master rights. Such self-determination over one’s career at the scale of his audience is rare, thus enabling 4:44’s window release while the rest of the industry retreats from such practices.

Audience reticence can also be attributed to the unlikelihood this is a move to build TIDAL’s user base. Kanye West claimed his 2016 release ‘The Life of Pablo’, ‘My album will never never never be on Apple. And it will never be for sale… You can only get it on Tidal.’ This position lasted around a week, with Kanye now allegedly having left TIDAL over unpaid royalties. Similarly, Beyonce’s TIDAL exclusive lasted just 24-hours. It is therefore fair to assume that music fans have become naturally suspicious about the nature of windowing and how long they will have access to exclusive content should they subscribe to a particular service. This accounts for the trend of free-trial hopping between streaming services as well as the fact that Jay-Z’s album has already been subject to high levels of piracy.

Streaming services themselves also continue to exhibit agnostic positions on windowing. Apple Music’s Jimmy Iovine earlier this year seemed to infer the company would move away from such practices, stating ‘We’ll still do some stuff with the occasional artist. The labels don’t seem to like it and ultimately it’s their content.’Spotify on the other hand, having previously stated they were against windowing, have in recent months suggested they may transition towards windowing certain releases on their premium tier. For these reasons, 4:44’s window should be considered less about swelling the subscriber base, as was the intention of windowing efforts last year, but rather reaching his most engaged audience first. Jay-Z’s fanbase are likely to be already on the platform when taking into account the immediate rush of subscribers that followed its release last year. Interestingly MIDiA Research’s consumer survey data shows that Tidal subscribers over-indexing as older and more prominently male than on other competing streaming music services. Whilst TIDAL’s problems are therefore unlikely to subside with this release, 4:44 could at the very least resume the dialogue on how windowing will be employed going forward in growing streaming’s paid users.

Today the IFPI published their annual assessment of the global recorded music business. The key theme is the first serious year of growth since Napster kicked off a decade and a half of decline, with streaming doing all the revenue heavy lifting.

The findings won’t come as much of a surprise to regular readers of this blog, as at MIDiA we had already conducted our own market sizing earlier in the year. The IFPI reported just under a billion dollars of revenue growth in 2016 (we peg growth at $1.1 billion) with streaming driving all the growth (60% growth, we estimate 57%). IFPI also reported 112 million paying subscribers (our number is 106.3 million, but the IFPI numbers probably include the Tencent 10 million number as reported, while the actual number is closer to 5 million).

IFPI report physical sales declining by 8% (we have 7%) and downloads down by 21% which is 3 percentage points more decline than the majors reported; this implies the IFPI estimates the indies to have had a much more pronounced decline than the majors. MIDiA is currently working with WIN to create the 2017 update to the global indie market sizing study, so we’ll be able to confirm that trend one way or another in a couple of months’ time.

Overall, the IFPI numbers tell the same good news story we revealed back in February, namely that streaming is finally driving the format replacement cycle that the recorded music business has not had since the heyday of the CD. Without streaming, the recorded music market would have declined in 2016. Streaming is driving revenue growth by both growing the base of users and, crucially, increasing the spend of more casual music spenders, changing them from lower spending download buyers into monthly 9.99 customers.

Also, streaming is unlocking spending in emerging markets (especially Latin America). The old model was based on people being able to afford a CD player and being able to afford to buy albums. The new model monetizes consumption on smartphones (which are becoming ubiquitous in emerging markets). Expect each year from now to see a reallocation of recorded music revenue towards emerging markets. It will be a long process but an irresistible one. Indeed, as Spotify’s Will Page put it:

“Spotify’s success story has expanded beyond established markets, with Brazil and Mexico now making up two of our top four countries worldwide by reach. Back when the industry peaked in 2000, Brazil and Mexico were 7th and 8th biggest markets in the world respectively.A combination of increasing smartphone adoption [reaching far more users than CDs ever did] and Spotify’s success makes the potential for these emerging markets to ‘re-emerge’ and to exceed previous peaks.”

One surprising point is that the IFPI reported a total of $4.5 billion for streaming ($3.9 for freemium and $0.6 billion for YouTube, etc.). However, the major labels alone reported revenues of $3.9 billion (see my previous post for more detail on label revenues). That would give the majors an implied market share of 87% in streaming. Which seems like a big share even accounting for majors including the reveue of the indie labels they distribute in their revenue numbers (eg Orchard distributed indie label revenue appearing in Sony’s numbers). Last year the IFPI appeared to have put Pandora revenues into US performance revenues rather than treat them as ad supported streaming, so that could account for an extra $400 million or so.

Nonetheless, taking the IFPI’s $3.9 billion freemium revenue and the 112 million subs number both at face value for a moment, that would equate to an average monthly label income of $2.90 per subscriber or a combined average monthly income of $1.53 for total freemium users (including free). These numbers are skewed in that they are year end numbers (mid year user numbers would be lower, so ARPU would be higher) but they are still directionally instructive ie there is a big gap between headline 9.99 pricing and what label revenue is actually generated due to factors such as $1 for 3 month trials and telco bundles.

All in all, a great year for recorded music. And despite a slow-ish Q1 2017 for streaming and the impending CD revenue collapse in Japan and Germany, it looks set to be another strong year ahead for streaming and, to a lesser extent, the broader recorded music business.

As we discussed in our December MIDiA Research report Next Steps For Telco Music: The Revenue Or User Dilemmatelco music bundles are at a turning point. Telco music bundles were highly important in the early stages of streaming subscriptions, helping kick start the market. But their share of total music subscribers has fallen from a high of 32% in 2013 to just 14% in 2016. The original thinking behind telco bundles was differentiation, but when every telco has got a music bundle there’s no differentiation anymore. Additionally, if you are a top tier telco and you haven’t got Apple or Spotify, then partnering with one of the rest risks brand damage by appearing to be stuck with an also-ran. By making a high profile investment in Tidal, Sprint has thus transformed its forthcoming bundle from this scenario into something it can build real differentiation around. Also Tidal has built its proposition around exclusivity and that is being put front and centre of this partnership.

Buy Big To Look Big

Meanwhile, SoftBank has the benefit of a high priced acquisition. Such deals are typically viewed more favourably by investors than smaller ones as it is a statement of intent. Often companies can quickly make their investment back in increased market capitalization because of an uplift to the share price. This is the strategy that kept Yahoo afloat for the last 15 years.

Tidal has struggled to make a dent in the streaming market and has seen more clear water opening up between it and the market leaders. It also has shallower pockets than Spotify, Apple or Amazon. This deal gives Tidal access to Sprint’s customer base, free marketing (well free to Tidal at least) and a war chest to take on the streaming incumbents. Tidal is not about to suddenly become the global streaming leader but it can now, with a fair wind, become a serious player in the US.